Change Room and Basins

The washhouse change room at Elrington Colliery is a simple, functional space: tiled walls, a row of ceramic basins, coat hooks evenly spaced above them, and overhead pipework running the length of the room. This was where underground workers removed dirty overalls before crossing into the shower area, a hard boundary between the coalface and the surface. The floor is bare. The hooks are still fixed in place. Nothing in the room suggests comfort, only utility. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited sank two concrete-lined shafts at Elrington from early 1925, each 18 feet in diameter, reaching the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface. Coal production commenced in 1930. The mine was built specifically to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks, and BHP intended it to deliver 3,000 tonnes a day using modern mechanised extraction methods that were largely new to the Hunter Valley coalfields. That target was never reached. By 1950, actual output averaged around 1,500 tonnes a day, roughly half of what had been planned. During the 1940s, approximately 275 workers were employed underground. At the end of each shift, those men came up through the shaft and passed through this room. The basins, the hooks, the tiled walls were the first and last fixed point of their working day above ground. BHP closed Elrington Colliery in December 1962, citing persistent operating losses. Large reserves of coal remained unworked in the seam at the time of closure. Approximately 90 men were affected. The railway branch serving the colliery was dismantled in 1963. The washhouse and its change room remained standing after the mine closed, outlasting the shaft collars and surface screens that were demolished by the late 1960s. This photograph, made in 2017, records the room as it stood: basins intact, hooks in place, paint lifting from the walls in patches.